1909] Pcploc Brown's Tragedy 239 



early hour to the studio and staying on till eight or nine at night 

 and never a day off during all those years. There was no bed for 

 him in the studio. Peploe spent his lonely nights reading, sometimes 

 Fred said for thirteen hours at a time, though he was almost blind 

 and had to use microscopic glasses applied to his single valid eye. 

 Being alone at night he had had a number of contrivances arranged 

 to put out or light the gas, or to call for help if needed, for he was 

 an ingenious mechanician. Last Christmas he was taken with a strong 

 bronchitis and a violent attack of what Fred called ' his lightning pines ' 

 (pains), but Fred nursed him through it till the late snow and cold 

 had brought it back. He had been left to sleep one evening, and when 

 Fred and the brother came back in the morning they had found him 

 sleeping still, but he was dead. It was then discovered that during 

 the forty-six years since his wife died, and in spite of growing poverty 

 and difficulties of every kind, he had kept all the things that had be- 

 longed to his dead wife, her clothes, garments of the days of crinoline, 

 her jewellery, her ornaments and the furniture of the house where they 

 had lived, stored in a magazine for which he had religiously paid 

 rent, also that he had worn her photograph next to his heart, and 

 they found it on him when they found him dead. A number of his 

 smaller treasures they buried with him in his grave, but the poor old 

 clothes and the furniture in the warehouse will be sold. He had sat 

 all these years under his ' Magnum Opus,' an immense picture in the 

 style of Murillo, representing the Adoration by the Shepherds at Bethle- 

 hem, at which Molony used to mock in its unfinished state because the 

 angels, represented as sitting in the clouds, with their harps not having 

 yet been filled in, left the expanded fingers in the grotesque attitude 

 that schoolboys use in ridicule, though this had been altered now and 

 the picture with infinite labour finished. It had been bought of him 

 out of charity by a former friend, Lord Bute, who had been kind to 

 him in many ways, but Lord Bute unfortunately had died, leaving the 

 picture there. Lady Bute was now taking it away to put in her 

 chapel. I asked the faithful Fred what had been done for him. ' He 

 had nothing,' he said, ' to leave me, poor gentleman, but he was generous 

 and good to me. I am by trade a mender of china, I mean to set up in 

 a small business, but I cannot get over the loss. I have been with 

 him seventeen years and never a day off. I do not know now where 

 to turn.' [I took two statuettes' of camel riders, which Brown had 

 modelled in his later years, off Fred's hands, they are very perfect of 

 their kind, and had been given him with other odds and ends from 

 the studio by the brother. Fred brought them to me a few days later 

 and left me promising to come again, and I promised I would help 

 him to set up his business, but he never reappeared.] 



" 18th March. — There has been a debate in Parliament on the 



